Status Updates From A Reader's Book of Days: Tr...

June 27

1787 Few stories of a writer finishing a book are as romantic or as well known - to earlier generations of readers, at least - as the final hour of Edward Gibbon's twenty years of labor on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "Between the hours of eleven and twelve" in the evening he put his pen down at last and took a stroll under the acacias in Lausanne, Switzerland, feeling joy...

June 26

NO YEAR The plan required five men: Kelp fakes a seizure to distract one guard at the New York Coliseum, and Murch crashes a car not the main entrance to draw the rest, which gives Dortmund, Greenwood, and Chefwick time to nab the Balabomo Emerald and get out of the building. And it all might have worked if Greenwood hadn't gotten lost on the way our and, desperate, swallowed the giant gem...

June 25

1948 It's a small house, but it's his as long as he can keep paying the bank what he owes, and what Easy Rawlins owes is sixty-four dollars by the end of the month. That's why, the the big white mand with the white Panama hat and white suit and bone-white shoes and eyes so pale thy look like robins' eggs comes into Joppy's looking for someone to track down a young woman named Daphne Monet...

June 24

1937 After his sister, Rose, later the model for Laura in The Glass Menagerie, was diagnosed the day before with what would later be called schizophrenia, Tennessee Williams worried in his journal about her sanity and his own. In the evening, he "lay cowering on my bed for a while and then got up with the reflection that nobody ever died from being strong."

June 23

1959 Was Boris Vian killed by a movie? It makes for a good story: ten minutes into a screening of the film adaptation of his novel I Spit on Your Graves, Vian stood up, protested, "These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!" collapsed of a heart attach, and died. The story may be apocryphal - although, as Louis Malle wrote about his old friend, "like anything else, the cinema can kill" - ...

June 22

Year 1342 (by Shire-reckoning) Bilbo Baggins, in The Hobbit, returns to Bag- End.

June 21

528 Finding himself, inexplicably, in ancient England and, more specifically, near-naked in a dungeon sentenced to be burned at the stake at noon the following day, Hank Morgan, Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, has an inspiration. "Tell the king," he thunders, "that at that hour I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun." ...

June 20

1901 Edward Cullen was born, a fact he revealed to Bella Swan a century later as "the light of the setting orb glittered off his skin in ruby-tinged sparkles."

June 19

1948 Robert Lowell, in the Nation, on William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Book Two: "It is a book in which the best readers, as well as the simple reader, are likely to find everything."

June 18

1815 "Depend upon it, there is no such place as Waterloo!" Jonathan Strange, the personal magician to the Duke of Wellington, possesses many powers in Samantha Clarke's prodigiously inventive historical fantasy, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - glimpsing faraway armies in his silver basin, bringing rain to slow Napoleon's progress, moving the city of Bruxelles to North America for the day - ...

June 17

1904 After midnight in James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus flourishes his ash plant, smashes a chandelier, and gives Corley a loan; Leopold Bloom buys a lukewarm pig's crubeen and a cold sheep's trotter at a late-night butcher and feeds a stray dog, gives Zoe Higgins his potato and retrieves it, and makes cocoa for Stephen; Steven and Bloom pee in Bloom's garden and look at the stars;...

June 16

1816 When was Frankenstein made? (The story, that is, not the monster.) The moment of Mary Shelley's creation has been nearly as enshrouded in legend as the "dreary night of November" when Victor Frankenstein gave the reanimating jolt to his monster. It was, as the story goes, a wet and dreary June in Switzerland when Lord Byron suggested to his guests - Dr. Polidori, who had just sprained his ankle...

June 15

`1904 Five days after he met Nora Barnacle in the street and one day after she stood him up for their first date, James Joyce sent her a note: "I may be blind, I looked for a long time at a head of reddish brown air and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected." The met the next day.

June 14

1728 It's a measure of the outrage stirred up by a small satirical pamphlet called The Dunciad, which mocked the horde of London scribblers as followers of the goddess of Dullness, that its author, Alexander Pope, had to take out a newspaper advertisement on this day asserting that , despite the claims of a rival pamphlet titled A Pope upon Pope, he had not been whipped on his "naked Posteriors" ...

June 13

1863 Darwin's Origin of Species took a year or so to make its way to New Zealand, but once it did, Samuel Butler, who had taken up sheep farming there to escape the English upbringing he'd later savage in the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, pounced on his ideas. On this day, in the essay "Darwin Among the Machines," he declared our machines wold be the next to evolve, leaving humans where horses...

June 12

1857 When no one came to shave him on his first morning as a guest at the country home of Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen sent for the host's eldest son to perform the service. This may have put him on the wrong side of the Dickens children, who found his stay interminable. As Kate Dickens remembered, "He was a bony bore, and stayed on and on." Having suggested he would visit for a week or two...

June 11

1687 Robinson Crusoe returns to England after thirty-six years.

June 10

1928 Among the hidden private references in the dream cityscape of In the Night Kitchen - allusions to Maurice Sendak's friends, his childhood addresses, his dog, and the hospital where he recovered from a heart attack - is a carton label "COCOA-NUT," "Patented June 10, 1928" the date of the authors birth.

June 9

1865 The inattention of a work crew on this day caused six of the seven first-class coaches in the express train from the English Channel to plunge into a gap in the rails in Stapplehurst, England. Left dangling over the abyss in the seventh were the young actress Ellen Ternan, her mother, and her secret paramour, Charles Dickens, who crawled out through a window and spent the next few hours ministering...

June 8

1290 We know little more about Beatrice Portinari than that she was the daughter of one wealthy Florentine banker and the wife of another, and that she died on this day at the age of twenty-four. After her death, though, she gained a kind of immortality as the "Beatrice" of the poems of Dante Alighieri, who claimed to have loved her since he met her as a child (though he had met her only once since...

June 7

NO YEAR The death, in Little Women, of Pip the canary.

June 6

1761 Famed though they might be for the line of stones with which their surveying divided Maryland from Pennsylvania, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon first met on another expedition of similar public fascination: their observation on this day, from the Cape of Good Hope, of the first transit of Venus across the sun in over 100 years, an event that allowed a more accurate measure of the distance...

1826 An epochal moment in the hothouse creative atmosphere of the Brontë parsonage occurred with the arrival of a dozen toy soldiers, brought home for young Banwell Brontë by their father and shared by his with his sisters, ages ten, seven, and six. They quickly named their favourites - Bonaparte or Sneaky (Branwell), Wellington (Charlotte), Parry (Emily), and Ross (Anne - Ross was "a queer little thing...

June 4

1908 At the ceremony in the Pantheon to inter the remains of his most famous defender, Émile Zola, Alfred Dreyfus, in an attempted assassination, was shot in the arm.

June 3

1906 Neither D.H. Lawrence, the son of a miner, nor Jessie Chambers, the daughter of a tenant farmer, had reason to expect a literary life, but they read hungrily together anyway in a teenage idyll. Then, just after his family told him to either propose to Jessie or drop her - he did neither - Lawrence began to write, and on this Whitsun holiday he showed her the first pages of a novel...

June 2

1816 William Hazlitt, in the Examiner, on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel: "He is a man of that universality of genius, that his mind hangs suspended between poetry and prose, truth and falsehood, and an infinity of other things, and from an excess of capacity, he does little or nothing."

June 1

NO YEAR Oyster soup, sea bass and barracuda, a calf's head in oil and a gigantic roast goose, rice pudding, stewed prunes, and strawberry ice cream, lemonade and a case of champagne that the groom calls "the best beer I ever drank": Frank Norris's 1899 Nobel McTeague is unmatched as a tale of excess, greed, and desire, and the feast celebrating the wedding of McTeague, the brutish dentist, and Trina...

May 31

NO YEAR "I should like to see you when you're tired and satiated. I shall prefer you in that state." What a quiet and diabolical seduction Henry James places at the centre of his Portrait of a Lady! Everybody desires Isabel Archer - who wouldn't? - but only Gilbert Osmond, the villainous aesthete, has the languorous confidence to tell her just before the part in Rome that he loves her but can let her go...

May 30

1887 After an evening of exasperation at the prospect of strikes and socialism, the wealthy and idle Julian West falls into a deep sleep from which he arises to the news that he has slumbered in a trance for more than a century. West wakes in the year 2000 to a society prosperous beyond his grandest dreams, in which the labor question has been solved and women have been released from both housework and ...